New Delhi: As the Income Tax Department launches its new e-filing portal www.incometax.gov.in on June 7, 2021, the existing portal of the Department at www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in would not be available to taxpayers as well as other external stakeholders for 6 days from June 1 to 6, 2021.
The Ministry of Finance today said that taxpayers are encouraged to complete all their urgent tasks involving any submission, upload or downloads before June 1, 2021 to avoid any difficulty during the blackout period. The Ministry said that in order to avoid any inconvenience to taxpayers, the Department will not fix any compliance dates during this period. Further, directions have been issued to fix hearing of cases or compliances only from June 10,2021 onwards, to give taxpayers time to respond on the new system. If, any hearing or compliance which requires submissions online has been scheduled during this period, the same will be preponed or adjourned and the work items would be rescheduled after this period.
The Department has also intimated external entities including Banks, MCA, GSTN, DPIIT, CBIC, GeM, DGFT who avail services of PAN verification etc. about the non-availability of the services and to request them to make arrangements to ensure that their customers/stakeholders are apprised, so that any relevant activity can be completed prior to or after the blackout period.
In the meantime, the new e-filing portal is aimed at providing taxpayer convenience and a “modern, seamless ” experience to taxpayers. Following are its salient features:
- New taxpayer friendly portal integrated with immediate processing of Income Tax Returns(ITRs) to issue quick refunds to taxpayers;
- All interactions and uploads or pending actions will be displayed on a single dashboard for follow-up action by taxpayer;
- Free of cost ITR preparation software available online and offline with interactive questions to help taxpayers fill ITR even without any tax knowledge, with pre-filling, for minimizing data entry effort;
- New call center for taxpayer assistance for immediate answers to taxpayer queries with FAQs, Tutorials, Videos and chatbot/live agent;
- All key portal functions on desktop will be available on Mobile App which will be enabled subsequently for full anytime access on mobile network;
- New online tax payment system on new portal will be enabled subsequently with multiple new payment options using netbanking, UPI, CreditCard and RTGS/NEFT from any account of taxpayer in any bank, for easy payment of taxes.
– global bihari bureau
